Transculturally rural: challenging convivial imaginations of ‘bettering’ life

ABSTRACT

During the 1960s–1970s in Ecuador, Indigenous and peasant movements challenged the descriptions of rural life in government education programmes while offering a space of transculture. As Sylvia Wynter [2003. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.’ CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337.] proposes it, such space allows to narrate human life with sensibilities non-aligned with normalised cultural particularities of the ideal tacit ‘we’ in national(ised) stories. This text engages with the convivial movements between narratives and counternarratives about rural lives and ways of living. It argues that rural can be thought as a genre and ruralness as a practice of existence, which disrupt overdetermining notions of what counts as dignified life, valid political demands, and possible futures. That disruption is an exercise of conviviality where Indigenous and racialised peoples challenge a living together under rules and practices that demand their assimilation or erasure. Their luchas (fights) are proposals for coexistence through social change. Particularly the article looks at how the poem The Bread of Life, published in the bilingual Kichwa/Spanish newspaper Jatari Campesino, pushed back against the logics of ‘bettering’ lives offered by Fundamental Education and Community Development projects. These were projects espoused by the Ecuadorian Government and UNESCO and funded by the Alliance for Progress, among other foreign aid agencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous
• sociogeny
• rural
• fundamental education
• good living

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the lands that sustain my life and made this work possible, Quito, Tumbaco and Dejope. I thank the spirits and elders that have and continue to care for them.

My gratitude to Estuardo Gallegos and Homero García for sharing their memories and thoughts with me as well as facilitating my work at the archive of the Centro de Desarrollo de Solidaridad Andina (CEDESA). I am thankful to Nidia Arrobo for her stories about her work with liberation theology in Ecuador. I am always in debt to Armando Muyolema for his guidance, support, and our thought-provoking conversations. My gratitude to David Kiefer and James Rayling for their writing advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Education through radio was an important movement in all Latin America at the time. Radiophonic schools were articulated to at least two concerns. First, after WWII communication for development became a field of inquiry and government policy. Radio education was part of the use of mass media to stimulate development and modernisation. Second, a vast religious network promoted radio education to impart literacy in the region. Some of the groups embraced development as the objective of education and supported anti-communist propaganda. Others, like liberation theology priests, focused on literacy as a tool to engage in politics. See Anna Cant, ““Vivir Mejor”: Radio Education in Rural Colombia (1960–80)”. THE AMERICAS, 2020, 77(4): 573–600.

2 It is important to note that superación is a highly racialised term as it has historically been used in Latin America to address the work Indigenous peoples and peasants had to do on themselves in order to become accepted into society. In that sense, it is an extension of the problem Wynter, building in Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, points at with the overrepresentation of Man and the production of damnés de la terre.

3 Modernisation theory found home in several research universities in the United States; some other main figures were Gabriel Almond, Lucian Pye, David Apter, Cyril Black, Bert Hoselitz, Myron Weiner, Karl Deutsch, and Daniel Lerner. See more in Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

4 The Andean Mission often worked together with priests as local in-situ leaders that could reach the community. The schools were funded by the Andean Mission and as such a project supported by governmental, non-governmental and religious institutions all with different views on the needs of Indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, these schools became a space of critique. In Chimborazo, the Andean Mission contacted and worked with an already very active group of priests led by Monsignor Proaño. He was a liberation theology bishop known as the ‘Indio bishop’ because he gained the friendship and respect of the Indigenous community, particularly in the Highlands, with his work and approach to pastoral work. As Estuardo Gallegos, a priest who worked closely with Proaño, explains it, that pastoral work was care for life and all relationships including those with God, with people and with place. In this sense Gallego asserts that an authentic pastoral work is a political companionship which implies supporting social organisation to eradicate violence, protect lands, and ensure own housing and education. In this line of thought, Proaño was critical of education initiatives that were functional to integration and to national economic production. Him and likeminded priests saw the UNESCO and CREFAL as appropriating the language and methods of liberating education proposed by Paulo Freire while considering people ‘one nut more in the big machinery of profit and money production’ (Proaño [1973] 2010, 16) The priests were also critical of the Andean Mission actions for development in that they fostered the integration of people to the nation and imposed nationalised culture and language rather than support people’s own social organisation. Despite differences, Proaño and the local church did collaborate with the Andean Mission trying to negotiate funding for projects of mutual interest for the Mission and the community. The radiophonic schools were one of those projects of mutual interest that once funded took its own spin in terms of objectives as it fostered Indigenous campesinos’ social organisation and education.

5 In the 1960s and 1970s it was a space where both social organizations and adepts of liberation theology worked together. The radiophonic schools did provide spaces for critique, discussion, and evaluation of the roles of its members and the values and content promoted in its programmes. The transcripts of Escuelas Radiofónicas Populares del Ecuador (ERPE)’s Reflection Seminar held in 21–24 February 1974, records members of the community critiquing the involvement of priests and demanding more space for the community. That the radio and its programming ended fully in hands of the community is a consequence of its members gradually occupying and reimagining that space into a cultural one. In a conversation with one of the current directors of the radio, Bélgica Chela, she asserted that in the 1960s and 1970s it was important for the radio to focus on educational shows and provide literacy teachings because there was an urgent need for that. In the present the focus is on opinion shows, news, music, and promotion of local culture.

6 In other stories, the first Inka woman was Mama Huaco, who was described as a warrior, a woman of power, and a kind woman who cured those in need with her medicinal plants knowledge. Simultaneously, from a Christian perspective and chronicles, she was said to be devilish, lustful with many lovers, she was free and a witch. She was also associated with the mountains and their worship as sacred wak’a. See Martinez Borrero, Juan. Develando el Origen de la Mama Huaca. Ediciones La Pajarera- Universidad de Cuenca, 2009, and Zevallos, María Angélica. ‘El mito de Pilcosisa y Mama Huaco: madres de una dinastía endiablada.’ Revista de letras 58, no. 1 (2018): 49–62.

7 The Quito School is the name given to the distinctive artistic production of Indigenous artists who blended their own techniques with European ones for painting and sculpting religious imagery. The artists of the Quito School received training and had access to materials and work studios in monasteries in the colonial royal audience of Quito which extended from Popayan, in what is now known as Colombia, to Cajamarca, in what is now known as Peru. The school’s most famous productions date to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

8 Still during the 1960s and 1970s, state, church and prominent families owned large properties called haciendas. Haciendas were destined to agricultural production with non-waged and some task-paid labour. One of the most prominent kinds of work relation was called huasipungo and implied that the landowners would ab/use Indigenous labour for production in exchange of giving access to Indigenous peasants to a plot within the hacienda for cultivating their own food and access to pastures. Because Indigenous peoples were constructed as a racialised subject not deserving of citizenship and narrated as occupying an honorary human-standing, the state law provided little protections which meant that haciendas regulated work and treatment of peasants in mostly an autonomous way. Under those conditions the work relation was immensely asymmetrical and the abuse of power rampant. Despite hacienda’s links to exports the regime deepened the monopoly of land without sustaining the desired modernization of the nation. See Luis Alberto Tuaza (2014), ‘The Continuity of Hacienda’s Discourses and Practices in the Context of International and National Cooperation’, Revista de Antropología Social, 23: 117–135 and Víctor Bretón Solo de Zaldívar (2020), ‘Del crepúsculo del gamonalismo a la etnitización de la cuestión agraria en Chimborazo (Ecuador)’, Latin American Research Review 55(2): 291–304.

9 There were two agrarian reforms in Ecuador one in 1964 and one in 1973 fruit of a convergence of interests from several groups. This included liberal politicians and advocates of the Alliance for Progress programme who supported the reform to attempt state’s modernization by disassembling the hacienda regime in favour of a market-oriented economy which necessitated partition of lands and waged-labour to foster competition.

10 See Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies and Practices Across the Andean World. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015; and Marisol de la Cadena, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond “Politics”’, Cultural Anthropology, 25, no 2, (2010), 351.